Stephanie ([info]mirroredsakura) wrote in [info]fanficrants,
@ 2008-04-21 19:54:00
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Current mood:crazy
Current music:Heather Dale - Medusa

Because we all know bad formatting sucks.
So I'm hardly the first person to be ranting about this, but when have I ever not loved digging up a dead horse just to beat it some more?

Okay, first, we all know about the Pit's latest session of stripping every sort of reasonable formatting known to man has made everything on that site look like crap, right? Yes, well, trying to reread my own fic on there hurts my eyes. And that makes me sad. Author's notes at the beginning and end of a first-person fic? How the hell am I supposed to tell where the one ends and the other begins?

So here's a riddle: when is a croquet mallet like a billy club? I used to use asteriks as my scene breaks which worked up until about the last format-stripping. Now that it doesn't, what does work? Hyphens? Plus signs, equal signs, etc.?

The easy solution would probably be just to up and drop the headaches of posting stuff in the Pit altogether, but I'm shameless and I admit it. I love feedback and the Pit does deliver [occasionally].


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[info]shanaqui
2008-04-21 11:58 pm UTC (link)
The horizontal rule is the only thing they allow.

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[info]bre_the_writer
2008-04-22 01:25 am UTC (link)
And they don't always allow that. For some reason, they won't upload it for me.

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[info]borderline_mary
2008-04-21 11:58 pm UTC (link)
I've defaulted to using:

x . o . x . o . x . o . x

It's not pretty; but they haven't yet stripped punctuation surrounded by spaces (thank God, I'd lose all my ellipses that I use far too much), and they really can't go around stripping letters.

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[info]deird1
2008-04-22 12:03 am UTC (link)
What's the bet that one day the Pit decides to ban all use of the letter "n"?

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[info]radiocakes
2008-04-22 12:07 am UTC (link)
Q will be the first to go. Alas, poor Q, I knew him, Horatio once lived on his avenue and sang songs am so damn glad people can't use the word "questioned" anymore can't say I'll really miss him.

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[info]kitesareevil
2008-04-22 12:50 am UTC (link)
Damn, that will really screw up some Star Trek fanfics.

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[info]borderline_mary
2008-04-22 12:08 am UTC (link)
$10 says within a year.

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[info]dinogrrl
2008-04-21 11:59 pm UTC (link)
I gave up trying to find symbols that worked and just use the line break thing they have in the document editor now -_o.

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[info]mika_kun
2008-04-22 12:46 am UTC (link)
That works great on the Pit, but it means you have to add the formating after you upload instead of just as you write which is a pain.

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[info]dinogrrl
2008-04-22 12:51 am UTC (link)
Yeah, but it's a lot less aggravating than having your scene breaks disappear, imho.

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[info]dreams_of_all
2008-04-22 02:17 pm UTC (link)
I gave up on those, because they say they move directly in from documents? But about a year ago, they stripped them from my documents every time I tried it.

MY RAGE KNOWS NO BOUNDS...!!!

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[info]radiocakes
2008-04-22 12:04 am UTC (link)
I... I just can't wrap my head around why everyone so vehemently opposes page-breaks. I just plain don't get it. That's not in a disagreeable way, either. I simply don't understand.

Why does no one like page-breaks?

And amen on FFN occasionally delivering feedback.

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[info]borderline_mary
2008-04-22 12:09 am UTC (link)
They affect the way I respond to a story visually. They feel too final to me, and it kicks the story flow a little off-kilter. Obviously this doesn't go for everyone, but that's why they bug me.

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[info]eien_herrison
2008-04-22 12:13 am UTC (link)
If I'm separating story from non-story , I use them, but if I encounter them in a story I always read it as "end of chapter" and it throws me out for a good couple of seconds. It's too distracing for me to read, and so I don't use them myself.

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[info]sarafinapekkala
2008-04-22 12:23 am UTC (link)
Most of my fics are less than 5,000 words. Having three or four huge dividers in a fic of that length looks absolutely horrible. If they let us change the width it would be okay, but as it is...

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[info]deird1
2008-04-22 12:24 am UTC (link)
I want to be able to differentiate between different degrees of scene break. Like if I have a scene that's flipping around between several mini-scenes, I want one type of break for the end of the scene, and another type for moving between mini-scenes. Page-breaks aren't that flexible.

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[info]germankitty
2008-04-22 08:24 am UTC (link)
Exactly. Three asterisks for 'proper' scene breaks, a single asterisk for a 'mini-scene' break (like, something happens during a certain event, or out of sight of the current POV character, say) used to work perfectly, IMO.

Now I have to use the same, overly harsh/intrusive line breaks for both. Ugh.

(And never mind having to go back through 19 fics, over half of them having a five-figure word count, to reinsert scene breaks at all or have them be one giant block text of doom? GAH!)

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[info]vandonovan
2008-04-22 12:29 am UTC (link)
Show me the novel where the scenes are divided by a HUGE PAGE BREAK line, and maybe I'll change my opinion on them.

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[info]radiocakes
2008-04-22 12:33 am UTC (link)
But it's true that on the internet, stories are formatted differently. Text is single-spaced, not justified, and there's at least one blank line between paragraphs, usually. Not disagreeing, just saying it's we're not necessarily playing by the same set of rules.

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[info]replica
2008-04-22 12:44 am UTC (link)
for me they don't provide a big enough gap between scenes--half the time I'll just automatically skip right over them and then be momentarily thrown off by what seems to be a sudden scene change.

if they had more padding surrounding them, and had the width changed to 75% or 80% of the page, I would have a lot less of a problem with them.

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[info]beccastareyes
2008-04-22 12:48 am UTC (link)
I like horizontal rules, but not FF.net's. If I could code it up on my own, I'd do a 66% rule for scene breaks, and the 100% one for separating story for notes. I don't like the way the 100% one extends to the margins. Stylistic preference.

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[info]effaced
2008-04-22 12:53 am UTC (link)
It just doesn't look good to me. :/ And anyway, I've written fics that have interweaving flashback scenes of a couple hundred words each, and lines going all the way across a page look weird so close together.

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[info]dreams_of_all
2008-04-22 02:19 pm UTC (link)
First off, I normally find them aesthetically unpleasing.

Secondly, for a long time I used them. Then, probably a year ago, ffdotnet decided to remove them from every story I had uploaded at that point in time.

Now they're all 'Oh! Those work!' and I want to commit acts of violence. I struggled with those things so damn long...

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[info]zorrotailsy
2008-04-22 12:07 am UTC (link)
hyphens are back in documents now... at least "--" is, because that's what I use and they're fine.

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[info]germankitty
2008-04-22 08:34 am UTC (link)
Yeah -- just checked some of my stories.

My current WIP (started after they removed asterisks) has -- instead of the --- I inserted originally, but okay. Earlier chapters, where I'd used bullets (···), either plain or bolded (···), are okay as well.

Only stories where I used to have asterisks or asterisk/tilde combinations (~*~) now have no scene breaks at all. (Unfortunately, one is a 20+ chapter opus of over 100,000 words I now have to edit and repost. Grrr.)

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[info]beccastareyes
2008-04-22 12:45 am UTC (link)
I usually use '-x-' or '.x.'

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[info]replica
2008-04-22 12:47 am UTC (link)
I just use x x x for scene breaks now :| it doesn't really work that well, but it's better than the horizontal rule.

of course, I also noticed that a few days after they stripped all the stories of their scene break formatting, they put them back in... one of my old stories used +-+-+-+ for a scene break, and it's there again even though it was definitely gone right after the change.

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[info]effaced
2008-04-22 12:56 am UTC (link)
I use "-o-".

The loss of brackets in summaries really hurts me more, though. >:

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[info]agilebrit
2008-04-22 01:14 am UTC (link)
I started using a :-: after they decided that things like asterisks and pound signs were anathema. They were stripped right after the change, I wrote them a bitchy letter, and they came back. Whether that was a result of the bitchy letter or not is an open question, as they never replied. My pound signs are still in, but the asterisks I was using when I first started were stripped.

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[info]toboe_lonewolf
2008-04-22 01:15 am UTC (link)
I use the horizontal line break to separate the brief summary/author notes, and then x x x x x for breaks within. I highly doubt ff.net's going to mess that up.

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[info]digital_pepsi
2008-04-22 02:40 am UTC (link)
I use random special characters; currently I've got an Arabic letter...which I can't read...but it looks neat.

Anyway; FF.net edited out a percent sign of mine once. I was not amused. :(

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[info]dreams_of_all
2008-04-22 02:20 pm UTC (link)
I know! Now I'm used to using the written-out word, but it's obnoxious.

I blame emoticons. Which I actually like, but still. *sadface*

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[info]phorcys
2008-04-22 02:41 am UTC (link)
No thoughts on ff.n right now, just random icon love :)

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[info]deird1
2008-04-22 02:51 am UTC (link)
Seconding the icon love.

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[info]the_ladytramp
2008-04-22 03:03 am UTC (link)
I admit, the Pit does offer feedback which is craaack encouraging--plus I've been there for about eight years, now, so I'm reluctant to just leave it. As much as it's grown into incredible SUCK in the last couple of years. The fact that they've been fucking with formatting is making me RIP my HAIR OUT. Stop taking away my freaking scene breaks and let me double-break between lines! *weep*

Oh, and ABSOLUTE icon love. Eddie = win.

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Nothing to add, but I had to do this ...
[info]lythinae
2008-04-22 03:58 am UTC (link)
when is a croquet mallet like a billy club?

Whenever you want it to be.

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Re: Nothing to add, but I had to do this ...
[info]orangenoslide
2008-04-22 04:13 am UTC (link)
Damnit, you are the LAST comment and I JUST got beat. XD

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Re: Nothing to add, but I had to do this ...
[info]martyfan
2008-04-22 04:26 am UTC (link)
Cheshire Cat FTW!

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Re: Nothing to add, but I had to do this ...
[info]mirroredsakura
2008-04-22 08:18 pm UTC (link)
*hearts* I was wondering if anyone would recognize. I'm loving the icon, might I steal?

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Re: Nothing to add, but I had to do this ...
[info]lythinae
2008-04-23 06:07 am UTC (link)
I *love* that game so much!

I can't remember where I got it from, but the credit should be in my user info ... so go ahead!

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[info]sjazzmreow
2008-04-22 04:20 am UTC (link)
Could not people get around their fics looking bad and the changing scenes not being noticable by just hitting the enter key a couple of extra times between scenes? A big bit of white space is pretty noticable.

And I've always felt the best way to diffrenciate between ANs and the body of the story is by writing the title of the fic on its own line, then beginning the story under that.

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[info]martyfan
2008-04-22 04:27 am UTC (link)
FF.net strips out the extra spaces, though.

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[info]sjazzmreow
2008-04-22 04:31 am UTC (link)
Ah, I suspected that might be the case, but didn't know.

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[info]dreams_of_all
2008-04-22 02:22 pm UTC (link)
I use a string of O's. oOoOoOo for the big ones, oOo for the smaller ones. Probably because they're not as automatically-a-letter as some other ones, and the x's make me think of usernames like XxXbleedinristsXxX.

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[info]cmar_wingnut
2008-04-22 10:16 pm UTC (link)
I use - - - which were removed in the last go-round but which are now back. Go figure. I've decided to switch to - x - in hopes it'll survive future purges.

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[info]secondsilk
2008-04-23 03:23 am UTC (link)
When they first took out asterisks, I put them back in with the html code.
Does that not work any more?

I haven't uploaded anything there in years.

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[info]mirroredsakura
2008-04-23 03:43 am UTC (link)
That's what I did too, but they've gone and stripped those out already. Which means all sorts of new ways to properly format stuff. A joy, ain't it? ;p

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